><(((°> wrote:
> When workers are idle is it sensible to railroad everywhere?
>
> Advantage: You get mobility everywhere
> Possible disadvantage: Rival spies have the same mobility and can get
> anywhere on your land with ease.
>
> I've often thought it might make sense to build a rail network with sort
of
> choke points enemy spies would opt to go through. Your own spies on
these
> choke points might then detect them. What do you think?
In Civ II, the AI would routinely pave every tile of his country in
railroads. I remember taking a relatively ordinary unit, and sending it
over my enemy's railroad network, visiting every part of his empire, and
then bringing it back to the safety of my own city without having used
up a single movement point. I did this EVERY turn, during the entire
time we were at war; it made planning my attacks a lot easier. I
remember having one fool decide to declare war on me without having any
invasion force ready to actually attack me. My first turn after he
declared war, I gathered every spare unit I had from my entire empire,
tele****ted them across my railroad tracks into his empire, where I then
tele****ted them across his railroad tracks all the way to the opposite
side of his empire, without using a single movement point. I took three
cities from him that way, and he sued for peace. As soon as the peace
treaty expired, he attacked me again. After the fourth repeat of this
cycle, I took his last city, and that annoyance was over, and I could
back to building up my cities, wonders, and spacecraft, which I find
much more interesting than warfare.
I made very sure that no one could ever use my own trans****tation
network against me that way. Roads were less of a danger than railroads,
but in the early game they could be almost as bad. I would build
railroads within city limits wherever they improved production; but
other than that I built only the minimum number of railroads needed to
tie my cities together; the same applies to roads. When I was being very
careful about it, I wouldn't even build roads until I had enough
population in the city to take advantage of the production benefits they
provided. With this style of road network, the cities themselves often
acted as choke points, but when they didn't I would build fortifications
at choke points outside my cities, and make sure to station troops there.
This is less of a problem in Civ III, because you don't get the
road/railroad advantages when operating in enemy territory. I haven't
played Civ IV yet, but I assume that the same would be true there.
Still, my old habits die hard, and they still serve some purpose. Having
a sparse road/railroad network makes it easy to slow down invaders by
destroying a few key choke points. The AI never seems to take advantage
of this by bombing my choke points before I've retreated across them.
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